Hitting services whilst digging.

[Bob_A]

Next doors Virgin cable is barely 1" under the grass. It's visble through the blades of grass in 1 or 2 places.
It doesn't bother next door though as they don't cut their grass

[rxbren]

last job was digging out the virgin cable was above ground for around half a meter then only just under the turf

[beenpavingfortoolong]

a bt guy will sell you (they normally just give them to you) repair connectors....with virgin cables we disconnect them from the wall box pull up the cable and connect it once dug out if it dont run along the border......

[dig dug dan]

one of my labourers cut through a main voltage cable to a house, which was lying on top of a hedge!
They tried to make me pay, and i refused and invited them to take me to court.
I never heard another thing.
Broke water a few times. Easy to repair yourself. never done gas
I did rip up a virgin cable. Spent half an hour fixing it, only to be told by the customer that its redundant

[GB_Groundworks]

so why the hell should I/we fork out for damage done to sevices that are not clearly marked or pointed out to us by the home owners because some lazy git CBA to dig a proper trench?

because you are a professional reputable company, not a cowboy....

you are the one driving the digger if you hit the service its your fault not the fault of someone not pointing it out.

no matter what conditions you put in your terms you cant negate liability, you are liable. fair play to the home owner on that one but if say insurance comany and solicitors got involved youd be paying for it.

we have to fill in excavation permits which have tick boxes for has the site been cat scanned have services been located and marked etc, before any digging on the factory sites.

check out this fun one we did, 6.5m deep sewer connection.

2 high voltage cables, a gas main, BT and that big boy is a 450mm cast iron water main that links 2 reservoirs. it was something like 30 bar pressure etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIl3YsURURA



Edited By GB_Groundworks on 1398716698

[Tony McC]

Back in the late 80s, one of our machines took the sheathing off a 33kVa cable approximately 150mm beneath the turf of a relatively new house.

The cable installers had 'taken a short cut' when the houses and an adjacent sub-station were built, and instead of laying the cable as a sort of right-angle L-shape at a suitable depth, they laid it as a hypotenuse and simply sprinkled some dirt over it.

As with the previous story, Norweb, as it was back then, tried to bill me for over 7 grand to re-route and make safe the cable, which I refused, because it was on private land, when it should have been beneath the public highway, there was no warning or market tape/tiles, and there was no depth to it, all fully photo-documented.

They tried getting heavy, so I informed them that a story in the local paper about how an elderly resident had found a blow-yer-frigging-scalp-clean-off, thick-as-yer-wrist power cable barely beneath the turf of his garden would generate quite a lot of interest at a time when the power companies were being flogged off, and nothing more was heard about it.

What I could never understand is how such a vicious cable could be laid without being checked by a supervisor. Friday afternoon job, most likely!

[dig dug dan]

poets day i suspect ???